Mineirão Stadium and Pampulha neighborhood were conceived during the 40´s, at the beginning of the structuralist fever that would conduct the economic policies of Brazil during the following decades. Not by coincidence, Pampulha´s mentor was Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, who granted commissions to vanguard professionals such as young Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx to capture the essence of his modern envisions. Quite a successful essay for his Brasilia from 1960.

Facing Pontevedra, on the other side of the river Lerez, an untidy urban setting has developed with a mixture of houses and amenities. It is an environment that demands clear actions that will regenerate the urban surroundings. The renovation of the old Pasaron stadium tried to liberate space on its perimeter in order to create new urban squares and green areas for the enjoyment of neighbours and to allow for an easier access to the stadium.

Facing Pontevedra, on the other side of the river Lerez, an untidy urban setting has developed with a mixture of houses and amenities. It is an environment that demands clear actions that will regenerate the urban surroundings. The renovation of the old Pasaron stadium tried to liberate space on its perimeter in order to create new urban squares and green areas for the enjoyment of neighbours and to allow for an easier access to the stadium.

Nowadays, the demand on modern stadium architecture is becoming increasingly complex. Besides flexibility and a comfortable spectator experience, the aesthetic and multifunctional ability of a stadium are also major design factors. Excitement within the stadium should be transferred to the outside via media facades. One of the most advanced multi-purpose stadiums that meets these demands par excellence is the Grand Stade Lille Métropole. This innovative building is clad with IMAGIC WEAVE® transparent media facade by HAVER & BOECKER. There are three different areas of varying resolution, each providing the optimum requirement for playing the media required.

This project is part of a 22-acre urban renewal plan, connecting an Asian city with its major sea port. Its goal is to revitalize a depressed area by catalyzing growth powered by a new soccer stadium and mixed-use development. The design team carefully integrated the stadium’s site and program to respond to its urban context. An existing multi-modal transit station became a critical anchor in the northwest corner.

Lansdowne Park is an historic sports, exhibition and entertainment facility in Ottawa’s urban center. An integral part of the city’s history, it features the aging 24,000-seat Frank Clair Stadium and other entertainment venues. The City of Ottawa embarked upon a major redevelopment, renovating the stadium and the heritage buildings on the site and adding 300,000 sf of new retail space. The renovated stadium can expand to 45,000 seats, enabling it to host national and international events. The stadium’s porous, accessible design encourages the intersection of people and built form.

A district town: Which must be an excellence tool for the public and for all its participants. Its architecture connects gardens, squares, covered pedestrian streets, gathering spaces and induce new urban compartments. Designed as a city fragment, not only as a sport equipment, our stadium is an attractor: innovative and generator of vitality. It is expanding in order to better reach users requirements: proximity, diversity, accessibility. It became a district, naturally sustainable and ecological.

Our stadium concept, unlike other conventional stadiums, is an elliptical spiral which is gradually unrolling and forming the built space with a slope of 2%, serving the 80 000 places (with a visibility angle that grows from 20% in the bottom part to 45% at the top part of the gardens). This disposition aims to offer to the public a perfect visibility from all the gardens. The slope also facilitates the access in the building for people with motor deficiencies.

BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL: As soccer enthusiasm continues to sweep the globe, venerable stadiums are undergoing substantial upgrades to keep pace with 21st Century fan expectations. Renato Cipriano, Partner/GM, Walters-Storyk Design Group/ Brazil, reports the WSDG international team has completed work on the Mineirão Stadium renovation and remains actively involved with a second major stadium renovation project in Belo Horizonte, and a third in Rio de Janeiro.

The competition for the New Tokyo National Stadium which began in July and ended in September 2012 asked for a proposal for the 2020 Olympic Games. We made a design whose intention was to allow people to feel very close to the activity within, to the athletes and football players, to the exciting atmosphere in which the spectator is involved directly in the games. At the same time we also wanted to design a space which was flexible, that could accommodate the wide range of sports intended for this kind of building, by focusing specifically on circulation that would make movement easy and fluid. In front of the large stadium area there is a main public space that creates a new Festival Sport Plaza, whose roof protects people from rain and provides shadow in the hot summer months. The space was intended to be used for exterior and extraneous events like concerts, oobon parties, political campaigns, small sporting activities, fairs, and many others.

While society is becoming more complex, two social dynamics could have an enormous incidence in the way that public space will perform in the future. People have a growing concern about environmental matters while an increasing access to information in real time ( and to the mobile media technologies that make it possible) are defying the classical conception of public space, redefining our expectations and confronting it to evolving demands for a wide range of new social experiences.